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Visit Greater Springfield recently received 8 MIDDY awards at the Ohio Association of Convention & Visitors Bureau’s Annual Educational Conference in Gahanna.
The MIDDY awards (named after Ohio’s Midwest location) recognize statewide excellence in destination marketing across all platforms. A record number of entries were judged by a statewide judging panel comprised of marketing, public relations and advertising professionals.
Visit Greater Springfield received more awards than any other destination marketing organization in the state. It took home first-place awards for:
•Our “Find Your Unwind” marketing campaign, which includes print materials, digital elements, bus wraps, apparel and social media.
•The VisitGreaterSpringfield.com website, which was launched in April of this year and features “mobile first” technology that has helped increase site visits by more than 160 percent.
•Our “Find Your Unwind” visitor guide, 30,000 copies of which will be distributed this year.
•The “Minute in Springfield” video series featuring staffers Kelcie Webster and Emily Harrison, which has been viewed more than 15,000 times via social media.
•Our LED billboard ad campaign, which is seen by more than 60,000 travelers every day on the I-70 LED board constructed by the Clark County Convention Facilities Authority.
•VisitorView, our monthly e-newsletter that is shared with our local tourism partners and stakeholders.
Visit Greater Springfield also claimed second-place awards in the categories of print advertisement and social media campaign. With these eight new awards, we have now received more than 50 state and national awards since 2011.
While awards are certainly nice, the proof is in the results. The local impact of tourism has grown more than $42 million (according to the Tourism Economics journal) since 2011 and the tourism industry is responsible for nearly $370 million in annual economic impact in Clark County. The local hotel occupancy rate — a leading indicator of marketing impact — is up 8.9 percent year-to-date compared to 2014.
Tourism is a growth industry in Clark County and it’s time to embrace it as such.
Funding for tourism promotion is derived from a lodging tax charged to guests staying in local hotels. Many DMOs in the state receive 100 percent of the lodging tax collected to promote their destination to leisure travelers, business travelers and groups. Visit Greater Springfield currently receives slightly less than 50 percent of the lodging tax remitted to the city of Springfield by our local hotels.
When compared to Clark County’s competitive set in Southwest Ohio (Greene, Warren, Montgomery and Butler counties), its annual budget is somewhere between one-half and one-quarter of theirs. This puts our community at a distinct disadvantage from a marketing perspective.
While Visit Greater Springfield continues to promote Greater Springfield at a high level, additional funding for tourism will be needed to move the community forward. Visit Greater Springfield has formed stakeholder committees to help create comprehensive plans around sports tourism, conventions and meetings, and major event bid fees. These tourism industry sectors have the potential to drive significant increases in lodging tax receipts, sales tax receipts and local economic impact.
The continued growth of the local tourism economy is good news for Springfield. Tourism is closely aligned with quality of life, business attraction and retention, relocation and retail sector growth.
Now is the time to invest in this growth industry and take the next steps to ensure that it will remain vital for years to come.
(Schutte is Director of Visit Greater Springfield)
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